WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The top U.S. Senate Republican struggled on Wednesday to salvage major healthcare legislation sought by President Donald Trump, meeting privately with a parade of skeptical senators as critics within the party urged substantial changes.

Republican leaders hope to agree on changes to the legislation by Friday so lawmakers can take it up after next week’s Independence Day recess. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Tuesday abandoned plans to seek passage of it this week because Senate Republicans did not have 50 votes to pass the bill.

For seven years, Republicans have led a quest to undo the 2010 law known as Obamacare, Democratic former President Barack Obama’s signature legislative achievement.…

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Senate Republican leaders postponed a vote on a healthcare overhaul on Tuesday after resistance from members of their own party, and President Donald Trump summoned Republican senators to the White House to urge them to break the impasse.

The delay put the future of a longtime top Republican priority in doubt amid concerns about the Senate bill from both moderate and conservative Republicans. With Democrats united in their opposition, Republicans can afford to lose only two votes among their own ranks in the Senate.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had been pushing for a vote ahead of the July 4 recess that starts at the end of the week.…

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Twenty-two million Americans would lose insurance over the next decade under the healthcare bill drafted by U.S. Senate Republicans, a nonpartisan office said on Monday, an assessment that will likely make it more difficult for the already-fraught legislation to win support for speedy passage.

The Congressional Budget Office’s assessment complicates the task ahead for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who must find a way to reconcile the demands of moderate Republicans concerned about people losing their insurance and conservative senators who say the bill does not do enough to repeal Obamacare.

Several moderates Republicans, including Susan Collins of Maine, have already said they could not support a bill that resulted in tens of millions of people losing their insurance.…

NationalMemo Reuters: Top Posts

U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said on Sunday that Democrat Hillary Clinton was a "liar" for claiming that his proposal to ban entry of all foreign Muslims into the United States has aided Islamic State's propaganda efforts.

President Barack Obama vowed on Sunday to hunt down anyone plotting militant attacks against the United States as he sought to reassure Americans after a deadly California shooting rampage that has raised new questions about U.S. defenses against homegrown extremism.

The relaxed reaction among the kind of voters who drove Trump’s historic upset victory -- working-class residents of Midwest and the South -- provided a striking contrast to the uproar that has gripped major coastal cities, where thousands of protesters flocked to airports where immigrants had been detained.

"This happened at the highest levels of the Russian government," Obama said when asked at his year-end White House press conference whether Russia's president was personally involved in the hacks. He added that "not much happens in Russia without Vladimir Putin."

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Pollsters project Macron's alliance could win as many as three-quarters of the seats in the lower house after next week's second round of voting.
That would give France's youngest leader since Napoleon a powerful mandate to make good on campaign pledges to revive France's fortunes by cleaning up politics and easing regulations that investors say hobble the euro zone's second-biggest economy.

Federal charges were announced less than an hour after The Intercept published a top-secret document from the National Security Agency that described Russian efforts to launch cyber attacks on at least one U.S. voting software supplier and send "spear-phishing" emails, or targeted emails that try to trick a recipient into clicking on a malicious link to steal data, to more than 100 local election officials days before the presidential election last November.

FBI scrutiny of Kushner began when intelligence reports of Flynn’s contacts with Russians included mentions of U.S. citizens, whose names were redacted because of U.S. privacy laws. This prompted investigators to ask U.S. intelligence agencies to reveal the names of the Americans, the current U.S. law enforcement official said. Kushner’s was one of the names that was revealed, the official said, prompting a closer look at the president’s son-in-law’s dealings with Kislyak and other Russians.

Ben Jacobs, a correspondent for The Guardian newspaper, said in a Twitter post and a television interview on MSNBC that Montana GOP Congressional candidate Greg Gianforte "body slammed" him, breaking his eyeglasses, at a campaign event in Bozeman.

Senators Richard Burr and Mark Warner, the top Republican and Democrat on the intelligence committee, said they were disappointed by the Flynn rejection, but will "vigorously pursue" his testimony and documents related to the investigation.

The Justice Department, in the face of rising pressure from Capitol Hill, named former FBI chief Robert Mueller on Wednesday as special counsel to investigate alleged Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election and possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow.

President Donald Trump asked then-FBI Director James Comey to end the agency's investigation into ties between former White House national security adviser Michael Flynn and Russia, according to a source who has seen a memo written by Comey. The FBI director wrote the memo after he met in the Oval Office with Trump, the day after the president fired Flynn on February 14. “I hope you can let this go,” Trump told Comey, according to a source familiar with the contents of the memo.

President Trump disclosed highly classified information to Russia's foreign minister and ambassador about a planned Islamic State operation, two U.S. officials said on Monday, plunging the White House into another controversy just months into Trump's short tenure in office.

The immediate challenge to Emmanuel Macron will be to secure a majority in next month's parliamentary election for a political movement that is barely a year old, rebranded as La Republique En Marche ("Onward the Republic"), in order to implement his program. Outgoing president Francois Hollande, who brought Macron into politics, said the result "confirms that a very large majority of our fellow citizens wanted to unite around the values of the Republic and show their attachment to the European Union."